Why the world matters

Amor mundi is the cornerstone of Arendt’s political philosophy. While articulated most fully in The Human Condition , Arendt’s love of the world developed as she thought with and against the tradition of philosophy. Beginning with her dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumous The Life of the Mind , the moral and political implications of being born into the world are central to her writing. After outlining six ways that Arendt describes our relationship to one another and the world, the chapter argues that amor mundi is both a critical and reverential attitude towards the world, in which we are born as beginners, with the capacity to act, change, respond, promise, and forgive.